Caleb

Something was different about Theo, but I’d be damned if I could tell what it was. He’d gotten to the house half an hour ago and I kept squinting at him, trying to figure it out. Finally, he crossed his arms over his chest and cocked a hip, all irritated and prickly. “What?”

“Just…there’s something different. What is it?”

Theo’s shoulders jerked in something that was almost a shrug. I looked at him closely. Everything was as it usually was. Worn, tight jeans that hugged his long legs and cupped his ass, looking effortlessly sexy. A soft black T-shirt. His hair messy around his face…was that it? His hair?

“Did you get a haircut or something?”

Theo turned red and threw up his hands. “I got styled.”

“I…don’t know what that means in this context,” I said.

Theo rolled his eyes, looking embarrassed. “The others hired this, like, style team to…style us. They gave us clothes like goddamned paper dolls and…did something to my hair.”

“Those aren’t your clothes?”

“They’re, like, Theo’s clothes 2.0. Exact replicas of everything I already own, only fancier. Why? I do not know.”

His exasperation was sort of hilarious, and when he swiped at his hair irritatedly he reminded me of a kitten.

“They combed out my hair so it was all perfectly smooth, then they put shit in it and messed it up again. Like, what is your job description, come on.”

I chuckled and explored his hair. It did have something in it. Some kind of styling paste or wax. I leaned in. “It smells like…Florida.”

“What?”

“Like sunblock and those coconut frozen drinks and sun. I went to the beach for vacation once. In Florida. That’s what your hair smells like.”

Theo sniffed at the tips of his hair and made a face. “It smells like shit.”

I nodded. “Yeah, not my favorite.”

“Fuck this, I’m going to take a shower.”

---

Later that night we were lying in bed. Theo, thankfully, smelled like Theo again, and I was playing with his hair.

“I talked to Ethan today, about not liking the whole fame thing. It turns out I’m a jerk.”

“Why are you a jerk?”

“I kinda…I just assumed the rest of the band was having the same experiences as me, I guess. Like, that they were just dealing better with all the fame stuff. And it made me feel like a fuckup, you know, because if they were handling it fine, and still excited about touring and all that, then what was my problem? But Ethan says he doesn’t even get recognized when he goes out. And he said Coco and Ven sometimes do, but not so much that it gets in the way of stuff much.”

“You’re the lead singer,” I said. “You’re the face of the band.”

Theo tucked his face into my neck and I lost his next words.

“What?”

“I feel so clueless. I seriously just assumed. All that shit that Ven would get so mad about, like an article using a picture of just me instead of the whole band? I totally understood that because it’s ridiculous. I’m one-fourth of the band. I got pissed because he would get mad at me, when I had nothing to do with it. But I got it. I just seriously didn’t realize that behind it was also this…difference in how people saw us. I’m…I don’t know. Like, listening to myself say it I sound ridiculous, but I just didn’t know. So stupid,” he muttered.

I felt a swell of affection for him. It was naïve of him not to realize the jealousy behind his bandmates’ resentment. It was clueless to assume that Riven’s drummer got anything like the attention as their lead singer. It was. But it was also so very, very Theo.

Theo, who still looked up in delight if one of Riven’s songs came on the radio, as if somehow a DJ had gotten ahold of something small and very private, and broadcast it for everyone to hear.

Theo, who was really only clueless about himself, and would certainly be able to see all these dynamics playing out in another band.

Theo, who would never assume that people would think he was worth paying attention to because for most of his life, people hadn’t.

I hugged him closer to me.

“Stay naïve, baby. About that stuff, I mean. Be savvy about the business, about production, about the music. But that stuff? The second you buy into it, the second you give it any weight, it can eat you alive.”

Theo kissed my neck softly, then up behind my ear, and I shivered. But he kept his touch light.

“I guess it makes more sense why they never wanted to hang out with me, huh? If they thought I was this asshole who was faking not wanting to be famous while they all really did like it and weren’t getting the attention they thought they deserved? Shit, I wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with me either.”

His voice was bruised, and it killed me to hear it.

“If you were honest with them and they didn’t believe you, what more could you have done?”

“I wasn’t, though. Not really. I never told any of them how much I hated it until Ethan, today. Because I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or look like I didn’t appreciate everything they did for me.”

I sighed. This story that Theo told himself always had the same ring to it: that the band had taken him on as some sort of charity and he owed them everything. It was an old story; older than Riven.

“You all got where you are together, no matter how it started,” I told him, not for the first time. “And did they really not want to hang out with you?”

His breath on my neck was shuddery and I rubbed his back.

“They—at first, they did. We’d go out to eat or hang at their apartment. But after a while, everything started getting so stressful. And we spent so much time together at the studio, and then on tour, that I guess I kinda started to crave alone time when we weren’t. And they all still lived together, so they had all these, like, in-jokes, and references, and they’d known each other so much longer. I guess I…maybe…shit, do you think maybe it was me all along?”

I ran my hand up his neck into his hair and started rubbing his scalp. “What do you think?”

“I…don’t know. They’re all more outgoing than me, so after shows they’d go out and all I’d wanna do was go to sleep. But I guess they did invite me. Fuck.”

He sat up and stared into the darkness. In the moonlight, he was tattoo-dappled pale skin and a halo of black hair.

“Fuck, Caleb, I’m so stupid! Have I gotten every single thing wrong?”

“No,” I said. His eyes were pools of shadow in his pale face, lips a trembling flower. “Not everything. It sounds like you made a few assumptions, and so did they, and then things just snowballed.”

“I just can’t believe this whole time they thought I actually believed I was too…too something to hang out with them!”

“Hey, you don’t know that. Band dynamics are complicated, always. And not all bands are the best of friends. That’s okay, too.”

Theo hung his head and twisted his fingers in the sheets. “I wanted to be, though. I wanted so fucking bad to be a part of something.”

“I know.” I kissed the back of his neck and pulled him back down. “I know you did. And you still could, if you want.”

“Maybe.”

“You’ve got the next leg of the tour to try it out.”

He lay back down next to me.

“Can I ask you something?” he said after a few minutes. His tone had the flavor of a question he thought I wouldn’t like.

“Shoot.”

“Why don’t you ever talk about your parents? Are they—I mean, are they alive, or…?”

I must have sighed pretty epically, because Theo said, “Sorry, you don’t have to tell me.”

“No, no,” I said, going back to messing with his hair. The old familiar guilt that gripped me whenever I thought of my parents settled in my chest like heartburn. “Yeah, they’re alive. My dad lives in Dallas and my mom lives in south Jersey. They got divorced when I was in high school. My dad’s remarried, got a whole new family. My mom was dating a guy for a while but they broke up a few years back, and now she lives near my sister.” I’d mentioned my sister, Kate, in passing, but had never told Theo much about my family at all.

“Do you see them?”

“No. Not for a long time, now.”

A memory drifted in, of Kate’s sixteenth birthday. It was her last one before my dad moved out, and my mom had made a spaghetti casserole. My mom was a terrible cook, and Kate didn’t eat much under the best of circumstances. But somehow, that night the food was edible, the grocery store birthday cake studded with frosting flowers made Kate smile, my mom and Kate didn’t fight, and my dad didn’t get wasted until after dinner, when Kate had gone out with her friends.

It was a good night. I was fourteen, and I remembered sneaking down to the kitchen in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and eating another piece of cake, enjoying the cloying sweetness of those frosting roses only because it had tasted so good the first time around, when we were all kind of acting like a family.

“Why?” Theo’s voice, soft at my ear, brought me back to the present.

“My dad’s a drunk.” It came out bitter and hard. As if I were in any position to judge. “I can’t be around him, now. Before, well…after they got divorced he didn’t really want much to do with me or Kate. He wasn’t nasty about it, just disinterested. He had a whole new model to break in. A second go-round. And his wife, Dana, she’s…let’s just say she could do a whole lot better than my dad and it’s depressing as hell to watch.”

Theo put a palm on my stomach and I concentrated on the heat from his fingers, imagined it seeping into me, reaching all the way inside, like he could imprint himself on me permanently.

“My mom.” I sighed. “She’s a real sweet lady. My dad’s drinking…it’s what ruined their marriage, ruined their relationship. So when I started with the drugs and all…fuck, man, it wrecked her to see me like that. She came to visit me the first time I went to rehab. And she was a fucking mess—worried for me, and wanting to help. But really, she should have been mad at me, you know? She should’ve been furious. I needed her to be furious. But she was just sad, and scared, and then I didn’t stay clean long, and I didn’t want to worry her worse, so I stayed away.”

The image of my mom’s face—hopeful and tentative and, ultimately, disappointed—haunted me.

“I stayed clean for about four months after I was in rehab the second time, so I went to see her. It was Christmas, and she had this sad little fucking tree, I remember. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend and she was sad, and my sister was sad. The whole thing was so epically fucking sad, I couldn’t take it.”

I left her apartment at 10 P.M., with a snow-streaked windshield and gray slush on the median, and I drove to the nearest bar. I got trashed and scored in the bathroom and made my way back home in time to pass out on the couch. When I woke up in the morning, the lights on that pathetic tree were gleaming with desperate cheer, and my mom was sitting in the chair staring at me. I followed her gaze to my arm, where my sleeve was still rolled up and the fresh track mark was clear. And I felt the despair of failure compounded by having a witness to it.

“After that, I just kind of…didn’t go back. It was too hard, and I didn’t want to keep getting her hopes up only to disappoint her again.”

“And now?” Theo asked.

“Now? Fuck, I dunno. This is the longest I’ve stayed clean, but…I can’t risk it. Not yet. Not when I know what it does to her.”

What I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud was that I had the superstitious conviction that if I let myself reach out to my mom and Kate, I would somehow jinx myself back to the needle. I could front all I wanted that I was protecting them, but the bottom line was that I didn’t feel strong enough yet. I didn’t trust myself enough yet.

---

We spent the next few days working on music. I played Theo the songs I’d written for Rhys, and he was enthusiastic about them. He loved what I’d written, and he asked questions that made them better, made suggestions that had me going back in to fiddle with them.

We finished the song we’d started writing together at his apartment, too, and I woke up to find Theo lying on his stomach next to me, propped on his elbows and writing in his notebook. I ghosted a hand down the gorgeous curve of his spine and he shivered, but his face remained stuck in the notebook.

I kissed the base of his spine, then kissed my way up to his neck and heard his breath catch.

“You’re gonna make me get a paper cut,” he said against the notebook.

“Occupational hazard, hmm?”

I kissed his throat, then his cheek, then nosed in next to him to peek at what he was writing.

Theo was sometimes happy to pass over his notebook and other times he pushed me away like I was cheating off his math test. This time, he nudged the book toward me and tapped it with his chewed-up pen, leaving a blip of saliva on the page, which he wiped away, smearing the ink.

He looked down at the notebook shyly. I grabbed his chin and turned his face to me.

“I’m really gonna fucking miss you,” I said, and I moved my hand so I could kiss him.

“Me too. Gonna give me a memorable send-off?” He tried to wink but just kind of leered as he ended up with hair in his eyes.

“What, you mean like a bugle fanfare?”

He glanced between us and then slid a hand down my stomach to my dick. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days,” he mused, stroking me.

“Mmm.”

I pushed into his hand and bit at his chin, teeth scraping his stubble.

He let go of me long enough to reach for the lube and a condom on the nightstand, and the line of his back meeting the curve of his ass mesmerized me. The tangle of vines that snaked from his right hip up over his ribs to his chest was shaded beautifully, and I traced its lines.

“Where’d you get this one?” I’d been learning them one by one.

Theo smiled down at it happily. “In Philadelphia. We were playing this club, back right after our first album came out. Real gritty kind of place, half bar, half floor, and a balcony. And there was a pretty big crowd, so it was cool because the show went well. Great energy. And I uh…well, after, I was kinda buzzing from it and there was this bartender.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Do tell.”

I traced the tattoo back down over his hip to his ass, and ran a finger down his crack, brushing over his hole.

“He—oh, fuck!—um, he was hot. Like, skinny, intense, tattoos hot, ya know?”

“Kinda like you?”

Theo cocked his head as if this description surprised him. Then shrugged and nodded. “I guess. Anyway, he was reading a book during most of the show. I remember because the lights would strobe on under the bar and I’d see him, nose in a book, totally ignoring us. And the customers.”

I started stroking Theo’s erection, and guided his leg over my hip so he straddled me.

“Didn’t like being ignored, huh?”

He smiled, then gasped as I rubbed the tip of his cock with my thumb.

“After the show, we were loading out and he was cleaning up, and he…”

Theo panted as I cupped his balls and stroked him harder.

“Yeah?”

“He fucked me—oh, god—he fucked me in the storage room behind the bar.”

“Mmm. Was it hot?”

I rubbed at his nipples, then pinched them just to watch his head drop back.

“Uhng, yeah,” he gasped. “And I said I liked this tattoo he had of a wolf, and he said his friend did it. Oh, god, Caleb, please don’t stop!”

“Keep talking.”

“Fuck. So, he gave me directions to the shop where his friend worked and she did it for me the next day, the end. For god’s sake, you have to fuck me now, please!”

Theo was breathing heavily, his face and neck flushed, his nipples pink from my fingers, and his erection spilling precome. He was stunning. I gathered a drop of precome on my finger and touched it to his mouth. He opened for me, sucking my finger in, those haunting silver-blue eyes closing in pleasure as he ran his tongue around my finger.

I wrapped a hand around his throat, pale skin shaded with dark stubble, and felt his breath, felt him swallow hard.

“Do we need this?”

I held up the condom and Theo’s eyes drifted open. His pupils were blown wide, his lashes damp. When he saw what I was holding, his mouth fell open and his breathing sped up.

He shook his head and started visibly shaking.

“You okay?”

I put my hands on his hips to steady him.

“I’m good.”

He bent to me and I could feel the sweetness in his kiss. The desire.

“You want to fuck me instead?” I asked.

His eyelashes fluttered and he smiled.

“Fuck yeah, but not now. I love it like this, with you.”

I slicked my fingers and slid them inside his hole. Theo’s gasps and tiny noises were an orchestra as I touched him. After a minute, he knelt and positioned himself to take me in. Our eyes met and lust flared thick between us. But the sweetness was still there. So much fucking sweetness I could hardly stand it.

Theo sank down on me in one sinuous movement, seating my cock inside him to the hilt. The pleasure ripped through me, and I squeezed my eyes shut at the onslaught. The feel of his tight flesh around me, his palms on my ribs, his eyes on me—it was overwhelming.

He moved like silk and water over me, creating a rhythm, then changing it. I lay there and watched him, marveling at how the fuck it was possible that I was here, right now, in this bed, with this man, when by all rights I should be dead. The gratitude welled up in my chest and I pulled Theo down to me, kissing his mouth desperately.

I flipped us, pressing him to the bed and taking him in long, deep strokes that pounded us together and threatened to throw me into orgasm too soon. Theo’s hands on my thighs grounded me, and his worshipful gaze humbled me again.

“I’m so close,” he said, voice just a rasp. “Make me come?”

At his words, any semblance of control snapped, and I drove into him hard, my ass clenching and my spine turning to liquid heat. I felt the first flickers of it in my balls, and I pressed myself deep into Theo’s gorgeous body. He stroked himself in rhythm with my thrusts, and his moans were the sweetest music.

I came with a shout, burying my face in his neck as I thrust, my orgasm blasting through me, turning my bones to liquid and obliterating the world outside of my pleasure. I came inside Theo in powerful spurts and felt him peak just as I finished, his muscles clamping down on me as he shot between us. He cried out, then bit down on my shoulder as his ass clenched around my cock, pulling the last shuddery tendrils of my orgasm out of me, and leaving me shaking against him.

His hair was a mess and he winced as I pulled out of him, but he looked fucked out and blissful, a soft smile playing on his lips. About the same as I felt.

“Sorry, baby,” I murmured, running my fingers over his hole to soothe the muscle. “Oh my god.” I could feel my come leaking out of Theo, and a fierce possessiveness shot through me. I pulled him to me, wrapping my arms around him tightly, and he made a groaning, purring sound against my neck and wrapped his arms around me. We were locked up tight, clinging together, and there wasn’t a fucking thing in the world that could have made me let him go.

Fuck, was I going to miss him.